You Have to Start Somewhere: Developer Origin Stories

Industry executives recall getting their start in videogames.
5/12/2009 6:59 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Gabe Newell
President, Valve Software

When I was at Microsoft, I got tired of the bad rap that Windows had among the game community. I was also surprised at how little people inside the company knew about PC gaming. When DOOM came out, it seemed like a great opportunity to show that a cutting-edge PC game could actually run on top of Windows. Michael Abrash had left Microsoft to go to id Software to work on Quake, which helped facilitate the discussion with id. That conversation eventually morphed into "Why don't Gabe and Mike [Harrington] leave Microsoft and start up a games company building on the Quake tech?"

Sid Meier
Director of Creative Development, Firaxis Games

Bill Stealey (my partner in Microprose) and I were working at General Instruments together in the early 1980s. He was in sales and I was a programmer. We happened to attend a conference together, and during one of the breaks we were playing a flight sim arcade game. Bill is a former fighter pilot, and was really frustrated because I kept beating him at the game. He asked how I was able to win. I told him I could anticipate what the AI was going to do, and that I thought I could make a better game in a couple of months. He challenged me to do it (which I did), and soon after that we decided to start Microprose. In the early days of the company, I would make the games, put them on floppies, zip them into plastic baggies, and Bill would drive a carload of them up and down the East Coast, stopping at every electronics store to try and sell them. From there we built a pretty good company.

Chris Taylor
CEO/Creative Director, Gas Powered Games

I had a job bending a plastic sewer pipe. One day I got so frustrated at the foreman, I resigned. I opened up the classifieds, because I knew I didn't have enough education for a "career job," and found the tiniest little ad that said it was looking for someone who knew how to program C and assembly language. I knew assembly language, but had no formal training, and spent most of my time working on a program to edit 3-D wireframe models. When I told the interviewer (who was a recruiter at a company in Vancouver called Corporate Recruiters), she told me that I was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but I remember every detail from that incredible moment in my life. That was 21 years ago.

Randy Pitchford
President, Gearbox Software

I had been fairly prolific in the budding online community -- amateur work that helped me develop a bit of a reputation in those circles. I spent a lot of time on CompuServe and other networks, and I ended up playing a lot of online games with George Broussard and Steven Blackburn. We linked up at the first E3. That night, I went home and rebuilt a virtual replica of the club in the Build engine. I brought it to E3 the next day and loaded it up, and it impressed everyone. A few months later, I let the 3D Realms guys know I was looking to start a career in game-making, and they offered me a job. From a pure dollars point-of-view, it wasn't the best offer I got, but the combination of being able to work with those guys and the possibility of profit sharing that they offered made it a strong match, so I took the leap.